Gone farmin’: Astros AAA pitching coach Hooton on Lyles, Abad

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OKLAHOMA CITY — Astros Class AAA pitching coach Burt Hooton, a former big league All-Star and veteran of the organization, was kind enough to take the time to talk about a few of his pitchers yesterday. It would have been the low point of his day had it not allowed him to escape the 105-degree heat that baked RedHawks Ballpark throughout the day and is back at it for today’s day game.

Many of Hooton’s answers about his current pitchers will appear in upcoming features or minor league notebooks, but he did speak about a couple of his “graduates,” so here are some of his thoughts on Jordan Lyles and Fernando Abad.

On Lyles, who made six starts in Class AAA last year under Hooton and 10 more this year before his callup.

I wanted him to use his curveball more. I think that’s his best breaking ball. He was throwing his cutter, throwing his changeup too much. His fastball is good and he does a good job of spotting that up for the most part. I wanted him to use his curveball more often — I think that’s his second-best pitch.

And the other thing is teaching him how to work so that he can get himself ready for his next start as far as commanding his pitches. Understanding that each pitch you throw you’re training something. And when you throw a bullpen, you’re actually working on something. A lot of young guys tend to get int their bullpens on rapid-fire without really paying attention to what they’re doing. I think it was more a matter of getting him to pay attention to what he was doing on each pitch he threw when he was practicing.

He did a much better job of concentrating in his practice and I think it’s going to show up in his games.

On Abad, who came down struggling with his command and walked 1 and struck out 16 in 12 2/3 innings at Class AAA. This clarifies Abad’s comments about what happened with his arm angle.

When I first saw him throw, his arm angle was down from where I saw him last year and he was yanking a lot of pitches and didn’t have control of any of them. All we did was move his arm up a little higher. And then we talked about intensity. It seems to me like he falls into a tendency to coast a little bit and he can’t do that.

When he’s real good, he’s getting after it; he’s real aggressive with all his pitches. That’s what got him to the big leagues last year and he was doing that again before they called him back up.